The SAT-BBE project responds to the challenge of the resilience and emergence of the bioeconomy by providing a design of a system analyses tool framework to assess and address the short term and long term challenges, for an effective and sustainable EU strategy. The project provides an interdisciplinary scientific basis to inform the bioeconomy policy development and decision-making by all stakeholders working within the EU to help improve the conditions for satisfying the bioeconomy potential today and in the coming decades. The outcome of SAT-BBE is a Systems Analysis Framework for the Bioeconomy.

Objectives

The objective of the SAT-BBE project is to describe, monitor and model the bioeconomy part of the economic system, by the development of an appropriate toolkit. The concepts of bioeconomy and non-bioeconomy sectors will be defined, the major interactions and feedback effects between the bioeconomy and other parts of the system will be identified and analysed, and the likely impacts and trade-offs of the bioeconomy "drivers" ( e.g. economic growth, environment state, policy measures, technological development, and R&D development) will be studied.

In order to achieve all these objectives, SAT-BBE will demonstrate how the existing data and quantitative models and their future extensions and improvements, as well as qualitative analyses (e.g. foresight analyses), can be used to describe the bioeconomy development, its interactions with the rest of the economy, and its impacts to environmental resources and their quality. The SAT-BBE 'Toolkit' will carry out the systems analysis to show, explain and monitor how the bioeconomy in the European Union is, will or can be evolving.

Project

A systems analysis tools framework (i.e. the SAT-BBE ‘Toolkit’) has the purpose to understand the functional requirements of a bioeconomy and to measure the necessary extent for transformation of the economy as a whole to a bio-based foundation. Systems analysis implies the capacity to understand relations between parts, and the nature of both the parts and their relationships. Tools are modelling and non-modelling analytical methods, organised in evaluation and monitoring methodologies. The project will match the tools with the requirements of the systems analysis and ensure that links between the tools and their access by non-specialists are explicitly addressed. Data requirements and indicators are designed according to the inputs required, and the outputs desired, for the type of analyses intended.

Phase 1: Scoping and definition of the systems analysis frameworkThe main purpose of SAT-BBE is to contribute to laying the foundations for sustainable economic development in the EU through a bio-based economy.

Phase 2: Tools for evaluating and monitoringThe second phase of the project is the inventory of tools for evaluation and monitoring, leading to their cataloguing by subject of analysis, with cross-references to the types of impacts covered and to the territorial scale of analysis.

Phase 3: Systems analysis protocolsThe final phase is the applied technical part. Phase 1 elaborates the concept and design of the systems analysis framework. Phase 2 identifies and brings together the knowledge about the tools (data, indicators and models) available for evaluating and monitoring the bio-based economy. The tools can be placed in the framework according to a system of categorisation, which follows from the cataloguing, also carried out in Phase 2. What remains for Phase 3 is to prescribe the operational linkages between the tools, with software solutions designed when feasible, and to develop a facilitated access to using quantitative tools for the non-specialist (to the extent this is possible).

Phase 4: Processing of final results for public disseminationThe outcomes of SAT-BBE will provide a direct input into the operations of the EU Bioeconomy Observatory, (currently under construction), but will also be capable of providing valuable information to all sectors having a stake in the bioeconomy: governments, research, commercial and industrial organizations, and NGOs. The consortium as a whole will use the information channels at their disposal to communicate the output from the project through the use of printed and electronic media, as well as presentation at colloquia, etc. Consortium meetings will themselves will permit an enlarged group of experts to review the work of SAT-BBE and provide their knowledge to the work in progress.